20 on Page SEO Techniques to Rank For Any Keyword

Here are the Hacks to Rank on Top of Google with the on page SEO techniques:

Are you Ready?

If you want more people coming to your website, then you must have to publish some great content which people love to share and link to. Apart from the content, there are many on page SEO Techniques which you have to fix onsite to get your site rank to the top of Google.

Sometimes, It’s quite hard to rank against big brands but using these on site SEO techniques you can rank your website in a better position than others.

” Before you start optimising your blog post, I hope you had done the home work, i.e Goal for the post, Keyword research, competetive research and so on.”

Watch this video from Rand Fishkin on How to Nail the Optimization Process for Your Posts.

Before we start, We also have to keep in mind that we have to make the post for the readers not for the search engines. Let’s make this post simple and let me explain some practical strategies that you can use on your website without much effort.

Post Title:

Title tag is one the most Important on page SEO factor after content. Title tags are often used on search engine results pages to display preview snippets for a given web page, and are important both for SEO and social sharing.

Use Focus keyword in the start of the title tag ( You do not need to use it as the first keyword but try to keep it in beginning )

Keep title tag limit to 65 characters

Do not use keyword multiple times in title tag

Use brand keyword at end of Title tag

Make Title tag for better click through rate, Make it convey the right message to new visitors. Better click through rate also helps in ranking better.

SEO Friendly Urls:

Post URL also plays a good role in helping your page to rank higher. Do not try to make the url long with 5-10 keywords. Keep it smaller and use 3-5 keywords in it. it is also easy for google to understand the page.

Keep the url short to 3-5 keywords

Use your focused Keyword in Permalink

Do not use stop words int he URL

If you are using WordPress like me, you can set your permalink structure to “post name” and then edit it from the post itself. This is also important aspect of on page seo techniques.

Use of Keyword in First Paragraph:

Use of focus keyword in the first para of your blog post is also important. If it’s possible then include it in first 50-100 words.

This will make the search engines Understand that what your post is all about. After the heading, this will give signals that what the article is all about.

See Example on this in my post for keyword onsite SEO techniques.

This SEO technique will surely help to reach your blog post in the top ranking of google.

Use of H1 – H6 Tags in Post Properly

Use heading tags like h2, h3 and h4 etc to highlight various headings, sub-headings, and important points.

Make your heading in H1 tag. I am using WordPress cms here so it will take care of this.

Also include your keyword in at least one subheading ( H2, H3 )

Use H3 heading for highlighting

Don’t repeat H2 or H3 tags too many times, as it can impact your SEO negatively. See this great video by Matt Cutts ( Head of google webspam team ). But never forget to include this in your onsite seo checklist.

Using a nice heading structure isn’t that hard and helps your visitors as well to navigate easily through the post and understand it better. So please, use a heading structure and the way we described it so that it is easy enough for everyone to understand and navigate through your post.

Keyword Density in Content

Yeah, great we are using keywords everywhere in the post But most of the people ask how much keyword density for Google? or haw many times we must use the keyword in the post?

Let me explain you the keyword density – Keyword density is the percentage of number of times Keyword appeared on a Web page by the total number of words on that page. So if in an article of 100 words you are using your Keyword 10 times, your density will be 10%.

Keyword stuffing is not a great SEO strategy. You’ll be hit by Google Panda (or another update) in no time. Optimizing your text for specific keywords however, is something you definitely can do!

Some expert thinks that you can not put a general % on keyword density. So long as it reads well and doesn’t appear to be stuffed, it should be fine.

Mention it as many times as you can without it appearing forced. There’s no doubt that having a keyword appear more times on the page will help Google deduce what the page is about, but similarly, anything that would compromise a user experience or attempts to over-optimise for the algorithm can easily be penalised.

Image Optimisation

Images also play an important role in both helping in web page rank but also in sending some traffic to a website via image search.

Use the main keyword in at least on image name and also use the targeted keyword in your alt text for Image. ( See the Image attached and uploaded on my blog post )

Use the main keyword in title and description as well.

Never do this for every image, yes you can use it for LSI Keywords. like onsite seo checklist is LSI keyword for this post.

It is also important to use the image with focused keywords because it will send signals to search engine on what your page is all about.

Again, make the page for better user experience and not for search engines.

Also optimise the images before uploading (Compress and resize), you can use WP Smush if you are using wordpress. This will automatically reduce the size of images.

Use outbound links

Outbound links are links which are sent to another website from your website. These links not only tells Google that your content is a great resource for the users but also help users to find good content relevant to the topic they are reading on your blog.

These also helps in making good relation with other bloggers in your niche.

Keep few things in mind while creating an outbound link on your page:

Only link to relevant pages to your content.

Do not link to link farms.

Try to link to the page which have a greater number of social shares.

Use only 3-5 external links per 1000 keywords on your post.

Use LSI Keywords in Post

LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are basically keywords that are semantically related to your primary keyword. Contrary to popular belief, they are NOT just synonym or keywords that are similar in meaning.

It’s more important for you to use LSI keywords to rank higher in search engine searches. LSI keywords are considered as an Important aspect of On-site SEO Techniques for ranking #1 in google.

Instead of using any LSI tool, the Best way to find LSI tools is Google search.

Use Google search to find a list of LSI Keyword for the target keyword. Place them wherever possible without diluting the natural flow of your content.

You don’t have to add all of the generated LSI keywords – only those which go well with your article. At times you may also need to add 1-2 paragraphs in your article to add LSI keywords to the article.

This is the easiest and most convenient way to find LSI keywords for your content.

Use Unique Meta Tags for Each Post

Meta tags also play an important role in both on-site SEO and click through rate of a website. a compelling headline will attract more visitors. Always write great meta description ( though it may not help in ranking in google ) but will surely help in better click-through rate.

It will tell people what your page is all about and why they must visit your page.

Few things to consider while you create meta tags for your pages:

Create unique meta tags for each page, avoid duplicate tags

Create Write Compelling copy

It’s no more considered as ranking factor but gain can improve CTR

Use Meta Robots Attribute for Indexing /No indexing page.

Use Canonical URL where as needed.

Create Long and Engaging content

Long and engaging content have a postive impact on SEO rankings. But never put the content there just for sake of long content, It must be engaging and converting. I will say you need to create great content.

The serpIQ analyzed the top 10 search results for over 20,000 keywords and noticed a pattern.

The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has.

So, when you write content next time, make sure it got at least 1200 words of meaningful and awesome content.

Long content also help you to get more social shares. So great content definitely won’t hurt you. So there’s no reason NOT to publish awesome stuff every single time.

A great text post is good for search engines, But wait. we are not making content for search engine but making it for humans. So use of Images, videos, slidshare presentation etc will increase user engagement on your page.

It will also increase the time of the page and also reduce the bounce rate on the website.

Higer the time spent and better bounce rate will help you to improve search rankings.

Use Responsive Design

More Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US.

After Google’s “Mobilegeddon” update, it’s no secret that mobile configuration is a big part of the future of SEO and digital marketing in general.

If you want to make your website mobile friendly, so that users can easily access it then make it responsive.

Make website to Load Faster

Page speed is considered as one of main factor for rankign these days. High load tmes can negatively impact your search rankings.

You can also use CDN to improve your website speed. You can use cloudflare ( They also have a free version ), Max CDN and any other.

If you are using wordpress, try using cache plugin like WP Total Cache.

Engage with blog comments

Engage your readers by asking them feedback and suggestions on the blog post, use comments section to do this.

This will also help you to get more content on the page and will increase the time spend on webpages.

Website Page Errors

Review your website for broken links (404’s) or any temporary redirects (302’s). You can use a bunch of tools for this like Screaming Frog or Link Slueth.

Make a list of all the links that need to redirect and do so either via HTACCESS or via your favorite CMS plugin or control panel.

For 404 errors, you want to make sure the broken page is redirected to the appropriate new page. If none exist on your new site, redirect it to the homepage, so you keep all your link equity.

For any 302 pages, make sure they are converted to 301 eventually. This step should ensure your site is easier to crawl for both visitors and search engine bots.

Use https

Use https instead of http, if possible. Surely https going to play role in search rankings in future.

Google has announced that going HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost.

Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit, only counting as a “very lightweight signal” within the overall ranking algorithm. In fact, Google said this carries “less weight than other signals such as high-quality content.”

Avoid Duplicate content

Have you made sure your site isn’t creating any duplicate content?

Utilize 301 redirects, canonical tags or use Google Webmaster Tools to fix any duplicate content that might be indexing and penalizing your site.

Have you created a Robots.txt file and submitted it in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools?

Share it on Social Media & Connect with Influencers

Interestingly, there are two sides to the story. On the one hand, Google’s Matt Cutts announced in January of 2014 that social signals — Facebook likes, shares, Twitter followers, etc. — will not affect search rankings.

He did admit, however, that spiders crawl social-media pages just as they would any other webpage. Today, we know that Google relies on Twitter, in part, to discover new content. Thus, the number of tweets and re-tweets a URL gets must be factored into the indexing process. And the faster you are indexed, the faster you’ll build organic traffic.

By contrast, a 2015 correlation study on search engine-ranking factors, conducted by Moz.com, concluded that social signals do matter. The study found that both the quantity and quality of tweeted links, Facebook shares, and Google+ 1s on a page are correlated with higher search rankings.

Moz discloses that the findings are not “proof,” but rather, characteristics of webpages that rank higher.

The positive effects from social media as it relates to search can’t be ignored. Top-ranking URLs do tend to have more social signals than those that don’t rank as well.

More likes, tweets, and +1s raise brand awareness, improve traffic, and enhance the performance of a domain. While there is no direct proof that social impacts rank, it is enough to consider integrating social media with your SEO strategy.

Schema Markup

For those unfamiliar with this markup, it helps search engines better understand specific information about your site, like the official business name and address, and displays this information correctly on result pages.

If you have products for sale, it helps Google list reviews and ratings right on the SERPs. If you’re an author, it would display your author picture next to your articles. This greatly increases the click-through rate (CTR) as searchers can see exactly how popular a product is without even clicking on a result.

It is essential that your site has some form of Schema markup implemented.

<p>With the changing nature of the search engine result pages, the continued importance of mobile and Google’s ongoing algorithm updates, long-term SEO success requires more than just a tactical partner. We can help you in getting more customers with SEO.</p>

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14 Comments

Alan

July 12, 2016 at 3:00 pm

First I will say, it’s a great post on Onsite SEO things. Surely these are main aspect of ranking. I have seen my website ( which have very low competition ) ranks well in google with just onsite seo fixes.

I will say that the keyword competition is also main aspect whether your post will rank or not with same efforts you put on on page SEO.

Excellent piece! 🙂 Thanks for sharing. I couldn’t agree more, LSI keywords are definitely a must to integrate in any content. It helps a lot in ranking the content in search engines. But I was wondering do you use any LSI tools? Would love to know which one is your favorite.